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For those concerned about Donald Trump’s authoritarian impulses, the former president has provided his critics with ample evidence. While in office, the Republican was routinely indifferent to legal limits and constitutional boundaries, and after being rejected by his country’s electorate, he took steps to claim illegitimate power.
After exiting the White House, Trump became even more brazen. The Republican announced his intention to become a temporary “dictator” on the first day of his prospective second term. He endorsed “the termination” of constitutional law. He said he wants to use government powers to crack down on journalists. He’s targeted Americans he dislikes with rhetoric that echoes Adolf Hitler. He’s made little effort to hide his plans to politicize federal law enforcement and exact revenge against his perceived political foes.
But just as notably, Trump has found inspiration from authoritarian leaders abroad whom the former president holds in high regard.
Ahead of the 2016 elections, the then-GOP candidate was on record praising Saddam Hussein, Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, and even China’s handling of the Tiananmen Square massacre. (Seeing images of brave Chinese democrats standing in defiance in front of tanks, Trump sided with those in the tanks.) Ahead of the 2024 elections, he’s doing it again.
The likely Republican nominee continues to make positive comments about the man who earned the “Butcher of Baghdad” label. He offers gushing admiration for Beijing’s “ruthless” control over China’s population. He struggles to contain how impressed he is with his benefactor in Moscow.
And Trump continues to shower Hungary’s Viktor Orbán with over-the-top praise, despite — or more likely, because of — the prime minister’s authoritarian takeover of his country. As a Washington Post report noted, this returned to the fore over the weekend.
During a Saturday night rally, former president Donald Trump reiterated his praise for Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has amassed functionally autocratic power by changing his country’s constitution and controlling the media. ... As Trump wrapped up his speech, music associated with the QAnon extremist movement played in the background.
“There’s a great man, a great leader in Europe, Viktor Orbán,” the likely GOP nominee said. “He’s the prime minister of Hungary. He’s a very great leader, a very strong man. Some people don’t like him because he’s too strong. It’s nice to have a strongman running the country.”
Right off the bat, the fact that Trump and his allies have embraced Orbán and his authoritarian approach says a great deal about the radicalization of Republican politics and the party’s weakening support for democracy.
But let’s not brush past Trump’s newly stated belief that it’s “nice to have a strongman running the country.”
The most benign explanation for such rhetoric is that the former president knows effectively nothing about political science, political history, and political philosophy, and as such, it’s possible that he has no idea what a “strongman” even is. From Trump’s perspective, perhaps the word just sounds nice because it combines “strong” and “man.” It’s not as if people should want a weak man leading a country, right?
But as NYU’s Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who literally wrote the book on the subject, told Time magazine a few years ago, “Strongmen are a subset of authoritarian who require total loyalty, bend democracy around [their] own needs, and use different forms of machismo to interact with their people and with other rulers.”
The less charitable explanation is that Trump knows full well what a “strongman” leadership style entails, and when he declared that it’s “nice to have a strongman running the country,” it was the latest piece of evidence that the Republican is effectively running on an authoritarian platform.